


Copper in the Veins

by KitsJay



Category: Grimm (TV)
Genre: Childhood Sexual Abuse, Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-02-16
Updated: 2019-02-16
Packaged: 2019-10-29 11:11:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Rape/Non-Con, Underage
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,595
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/17806919
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KitsJay/pseuds/KitsJay
Summary: One of Nick's cases hits too close to home.





	Copper in the Veins

**Author's Note:**

> Originally a fill on the Grimm kinkmeme.

A sick malaise trails him all day, like his skin is too loose and too hot and about to fall off of his bones. Every time he speaks, he can feel his tongue turn to glass, threatening to shatter. He feels fragile, for the first time in a long time.

It doesn't register, at first, where it's coming from. The case is one like others he's seen before, but something about this one is scratching at the back of his brain with long, thin fingernails.

He shakes it off, goes about his work, doesn't look at his hands and the way that his signature is shakier than it usually is.

"Nick," Hank says, and he realizes that Hank's looking at him with concern. Like he had to repeat himself several times.

He clears his throat, tries to smile, knows that it comes out wavering and uncertain. "Sorry. Zoning for a minute there. What's up?"

"Captain wants to see us," Hank says, then hesitates, and leans forward. "You okay?"

"Yeah," Nick says, feigning a stretch. The lie slips easily off the edge of his glass tongue. "Didn't sleep well last night."

The Captain is talking, asking about progress in the case, stressing the importance of catching whoever this guy is and fast; he's not a killer, but he takes lives all the same. There's an open folder on the desk, the photograph of the first victim, smiling in a soccer uniform, dark hair, child-wide grin on his face. The kid in the photograph has no idea that in three months, his life is going to be turned upside down, changed forever, that he'll be shaking in a blanket and holding onto his mom while the EMTs check him out with quiet questions and soothing sounds.

That part, at least, isn't familiar.

Nick isn't sure if that's better or worse.

"Nick?" Renard reaches out a hand to touch his shoulder, and without thinking, without really meaning to, Nick's thrown himself back, bumping his shoulder into the bookcase of the office. A few detectives' handbooks spill from its shelves to the ground and he immediately curses, bending to pick them up and offering, "Sorry, sorry."

Hank and Renard are staring at him like there's something wrong, and his skin crawls at it.

"Detective, may I speak to you alone?" Renard says slowly. It's phrased like a question, but Nick knows an order when he hears one. Hank shoots him a look as he walks out the door, taking the file folder and the picture of a smiling kid with him.

"Detective," Renard says, then hesitates, begins again in a softer tone, "Nick. Is everything alright?"

No, Nick thinks, but says, "Fine. Everything is fine."

Renard stares at him evenly, and Nick wants to fidget, scream, do anything under the attention other than return that stare with a face as smooth as glass. His captain's concern rolls off the surface like rain droplets.

"If there's anything," Renard begins, and Nick knows better than to sigh in relief.

"I'll let you know," Nick nods crisply. "If that's all, sir?"

"That's all," Renard says, and Nick disappears out the door.

 

"You smell weird," Monroe says in greeting.

Nick arches an eyebrow. He's starting to feel a little bit more like himself, a little less like the fragile-skinned person he was at the station. He lets himself in, walks into the kitchen and lets Monroe follow him, sniffing at him.

"I took a shower," Nick says, pouring himself a glass of coffee.

"That's not--" Monroe sniffs again. "You smell tangy."

"Tangy?"

"Coppery. It's weird. It smells like," and Monroe pauses. Nick waits for him to finish, but it's obvious that whatever Monroe was going to finish that sentence with, he's locked it away.

"Like?" Nick prompts.

"Prey," Monroe grinds out. "It smells like fear."

That feeling like his blood is oil jangling on a hot skillet is back. Nick ignores it.

"Are you working on that case?" Monroe asks, and Nick wants to say, _I'm not talking about that I'm not thinking about that please stop talking please I'm sorry,_ always I'm sorry even though he never did anything wrong.

"What case?"

"The one on the news, the pedophile," Monroe makes a face. There's red-hot anger flickering in his eyes. Nick wonders if it's like prison, where the child molesters and rapists have to be separated from the general populace, because even the murderers and worst of society can't abide by that kind of evil.

"Yes," Nick says and pretends to take another sip of his coffee, feels his stomach sour into bile, checks his breathing _don't slow it down, don't speed it up, don't hold it, just act natural, no one will know._

He screwed up though, somehow, because Monroe reaches forward to touch him and he flinches, a full-body shudder like a horse's flank at the touch of a whip. Monroe stops, holds his hands up in a disarming gesture.

"Easy, I'm just--"

"I'm sorry, please, I'm sorry," Nick can't stop saying, falling off his tongue even as he tries to halt the flood. He bites off the, "don't, please" before it can escape fully, but Monroe's eyes widen in stunned realization at the words.

Or maybe it's the prey scent still clinging to him like he's seven years old again, maybe it's Nick's reaction, maybe it's his wide eyes and the way his knuckles are white-tight around the cup and the burn of red skin where the coffee splashed up.

"Oh, Jesus, Nick, did--"

"It's not like that," Nick says quickly, and there's a voice in his mind screaming in a voice drenched with shame.

He doesn't know which to listen to, and fear wins, that louder voice wins again, like it always has, and he wants to squeeze his eyes shut and pretend this is all a dream, but he can't, because it'd be dark, and when he opened them, there'd be the shaft of light from a doorway opening in the middle of the night, the sound of a man kneeling next to his bed, the quiet shushing noises when Nick cried because it _hurt_ and even if he had been too young to understand what was going on, he knew he wanted it to stop.

So he keeps his eyes open, barely even blinking, staring at Monroe, whose face is jumping from confusion to disbelief, to anger, to sympathy.

"It wasn't," Nick tries again, but his voice chokes up, and even his glass tongue shatters in his mouth. "It was a long time ago."

"That doesn't mean it doesn't matter, Nick," Monroe says gently, oh so gently, and Nick wants to tell him that he should save his sympathy for the kids now, not the stupid little boy too dumb to tell anyone what was happening on nights when everyone was sleeping down the hall and all the lights were off.

"It _doesn't_ ," he says fiercely.

There's a silence that's only broken by Nick's ragged, uncertain breaths, and Monroe's own quieter breathing.

"Okay," Monroe says, backing up, giving him space, and it's so textbook "What to Do With a Victim" that Nick wants to laugh. "We don't have to talk about it."

But the thing is, that quiet voice keeps nudging him, and Nick thinks that Monroe knows about him being a Grimm, and knows about _him_ , and there's this crevice that has been growing wider every day since he was six years old that he has been trying to ignore. He wants to tell someone, he realizes, desperately, but he wishes they just knew. That he didn't have to clumsily say the words out loud.

If all the fairy tales are true, Nick thinks, then maybe the one about words having power, that one's true too. Maybe that's why he's never said it out loud, because that would mean it was true.

And some days, on his darker ones, he wonders if he made it up. If his mind just came up with something and he believed it, too confused to know better. He knows he didn't, but doubt speaks loudest of all.

"There was this family who fostered me for a while. The mom was really nice, I liked her. The dad was... He--" and he really means to say it, but the air is thin, spreading out until he has to gasp to pull any in at all, and his voice goes thin and reedy like a child's, and he hears himself choke out, " _hurt_ me."

A euphemism, the closest he can come to saying what happened.

Monroe gets it, though. Nick locks eyes with him, willing him to understand, and Monroe does.

"Oh, Jesus," Monroe says again. He looks like he doesn't know what to say and Nick can feel his breath ratchet tighter with each second. Monroe says, "Nick, I'm so sorry. Jesus."

"It's okay," Nick says, his head moving sharply to the side. "It happened a long time ago."

"Did you ever--" Monroe pauses, continues gamely on, "Did you ever tell anyone?"

Nick thinks of all the people he could have told. The social services lady, who visited to ask how he was doing. The nice mom, who laughed lightly and smelled sweet and had no idea who her husband really was.

"No."

It's killing him, waiting for the inevitable, "Why not?", that he never seems to have an answer to, but Monroe surprises him, just says sadly, "I'm so sorry, Nick."

He never told anyone before, so he never knew how _good_ it felt to just hear those words.


End file.
